In the following essay, Praeger explores Beckett's views on language and linguistics by studying the writer's translation of his own work Mercier et Camier.

Until recently, Beckett's activity as a self-translator has largely been ignored equally by French and Anglo-Saxon critics, both of whom have tended, without feeling hampered, to overlook Beckett's production in the other tongue. Thus we have a farcical, New Novelist-like, Francophone Beckett and an existential, bleak, Anglophone Beckett. Ruby Cohn's 1962 study was an early exception to that state of Beckett studies. Currently, however, a whole new area is developing in Beckett studies which deals with the artist as self-translator, Brian Fitch being at the forefront with his Beckett and Babel. Fitch's study gives self-translating a central place in Beckett's oeuvre and opens up, at last, an interlingual and...